Feb 7 (Reuters) - Using weak electrical currents passed into
the brain through a headband may help relieve depression
symptoms for some patients when combined with an antidepressant,
according to a U.S. and Brazilian study.
Researchers writing in JAMA Psychiatry found that after six
weeks of treatment with a combination of brain stimulation -
known as transcranial direct current stimulation or tDCS - and
sertraline, marketed as Zoloft, nearly two-thirds of depressed
participants got significantly better.
"In major depressive disorder, the combination of
transcranial direct current stimulation and sertraline increases
the efficacy of each treatment," wrote lead researcher Felipe
Fregni from the Harvard Medical School.
For the study, Fregni and Brazilian colleagues randomly
assigned 120 people in Brazil with moderate to severe depression
to one of four treatments: brain stimulation and sertraline,
brain stimulation and a placebo drug, sham stimulation and
sertraline, or sham stimulation and a placebo.
No tDCS devices, including the one used in the study, are
approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for use on the
brain, but older types of non-invasive brain stimulation are
approved and becoming established treatment options for
depression, researchers noted.
Electrical current therapy was given for 30 minutes at a
time over 12 total sessions.
At the beginning of the study, participants in each of the
four groups had an average depression score between 30 and 31 on
a 0-to-60 scale, where a higher score meant worse depression.
After six weeks, people in the combined stimulation and
sertraline group saw their depression drop to a score of 13, on
average, compared to 25 among people who received both fake
"In the field of depression, it's important to know about
treatment options, and medications alone don't work for
everyone," said Sarah Lisanby, a psychiatrist who studies brain
stimulation at Duke University.
"Now there's a broadened array of new, device-based
therapies that allow us to affect brain function in less
Data on side effects suggested that the tDCS stimulation had
no effect on cognition, researchers said. Skin redness was more
common with the real device than the sham stimulator.
The drug alone and electrical stimulation alone were
similarly effective at easing depression symptoms, Fregni's team
said. However, the dose of sertraline used - 50 milligrams per
day - might have been too low to help most people, psychiatrists
Philip Janicek, from Rush University Medical Center in
Chicago, said it was still unclear whether this type of
stimulation can help people with depression.
"tDCS could very well be an effective treatment," he said,
though he added that at this point he would not recommend it
based on the current evidence.
(Reporting from New York by Genevra Pittman at Reuters Health;
editing by Elaine Lies)